Exposure

  “Come on,” he said. Then added stupidly, hopefully, “You’ll be okay.” He held the back door of the cab open and Fidel got in, then Bush, awkwardly.

  Felicia said, “I’m comin’ too.”

  “Right,” Faustino said. “Good. Thank you.” He got into the front passenger seat.

  The driver said, “That everybody?”

  Nobody spoke. It was almost unbearable. At the lights on Buendía, the driver jockeyed the cab over into the left-hand lane and said, “You’re that Paul Faustino, right?”

  “No,” Faustino said. He’d been wondering if Bush or Felicia had ever been in a car before. He’d been wanting to turn to look at them and been afraid to.

  The driver said, “No? Well, you sure look like him. You know the guy I mean?”

  The police mortuary did not announce itself. Two of its three stories were underground. Its black glass doors parted automatically. Hilario Nemiso was talking into his cell phone when they opened.

  It was difficult to settle upon an order of parade. Bush was the important one, but also the most unreliable. Jittery dread came off him like waves through the conditioned air. So Nemiso led the way down the stairs, with Fidel alongside him. Felicia and Bush followed, then Faustino, who didn’t know if he would block the boy if he tried to flee or run with him up and away from the horror into the hot light of day.

  They came down into a corridor that ended at a pair of heavy-looking doors with scratched plastic windows set into them. There was a telephone on the wall, and Nemiso spoke into it. The doors opened, and a woman came out wearing white clothes, a white paper hat, and, appallingly, white rubber boots. She stood clasping her hands in front of her like a weird and solemn usherette.

  Nemiso turned to Bush and said gently, “Are you ready?”

  The boy gasped, perhaps an attempt at a word, and managed no more than three paces toward the door before his legs gave way. He stumbled sideways and leaned for support on a metal wastebin strapped to the wall. The bin had the words NONCLINICAL WASTE on it. Faustino was the first to reach him. He held the boy awkwardly from behind, his hands under the kid’s arms.

  “Oh, man, oh shit, man. I can’ do this. I jus’ can’ do this.” The words were snags in Bush’s shallow breathing.

  “Okay, okay,” Faustino murmured. He looked around, dismayed that his peripheral vision was blurry and wet. There was a bench against the wall, and he led the boy to it, supporting him.

  Nemiso stood with his hands behind his back and his head lowered. Felicia stepped up to him. “I’ll do it,” she said. “You can put me down as her sister if tha’s what you gotta do.”

  “Okay,” Nemiso said after a moment. “Thank you.”

  Fidel was standing close to Felicia. She reached out and took his hand. It was the first time she’d ever done that, and although Fidel was startled by it, he held on tight. Nemiso nodded to the woman in white. She held the door open and Felicia and Fidel followed Nemiso through it.

  It was a big room, but most of it was closed off by gray curtains hung from rails fixed to the ceiling. The cart was gray, too. The white bundle on it looked too small to be Bianca. The white usherette went to the end of it and pulled down the sheet just as far as the chin.

  It was a trick. Bianca was asleep. Apart from the grayish pallor to her skin, she looked just like she always did asleep: serious but untroubled.

  Fidel groaned like someone disappointed by a joke and turned away. Felicia stared down silently for several seconds, then nodded, spilling her tears. She reached out and stroked Bianca’s left temple with the backs of her fingers. It was shockingly cold.

  “You fool girl,” she whispered. “You fool, fool girl.”

  Nemiso did not lead Felicia and Fidel back to the corridor. He took them through a door and into a room lined with numbered metal lockers. On a steel-topped table there were zip-sealed clear plastic bags containing items of clothing.

  “I’d like you to look at these,” Nemiso said. “These are the clothes Bianca was wearing when she was found.”

  Felicia picked up a bag containing a reversible hoodie, cream on the inside, slate-gray and cream stripes on the outside. Even through the plastic she could feel how soft and new it was. She put it down and took up another bag: a pair of gray canvas sneakers with striped gray-and-cream laces.

  She looked at Nemiso blankly. “It ain’ her stuff,” she said. “You got things mixed up somehow.”

  “No, I promise you. These are what Bianca was wearing. You don’t recognize them? Do you, Señor Ramirez?”

  Fidel gingerly picked up a couple of items. “No. Never seen her wearing anything like this. All this stuff looks, like, brand-new. And kinda expensive.”

  “Yes. As far as we can establish, it is all new. There are no stains, marks, rips. It seems likely that Bianca was the first person to wear any of it. It’s also strange that there are no manufacturer’s labels.”

  Felicia found herself crying again and fiercely wiped her eyes with her hands. “It don’ make no sense,” she said.

  Nemiso waited until the girl had collected herself. “Felicia, I have to ask you this. Did Bianca ever steal things?”

  “Like what? She ain’ got nothin’. You think she got a whole buncha nice clothes stashed somewhere I don’ know about? No. No way.” She calmed herself a little. “Anyway, are you sayin’ like she went out that day, stole all this stuff from some high-class place uptown? An’ changed into it all, an’ went walkin’ around in it back down the Triangle? Man, tha’s jus’ stupid. Not even Bianca’s crazy enough to do that. There’s people would kill you for this kinda —”

  She stopped.

  Nemiso nodded. “Yes. But she wasn’t robbed. And there’s also this.” He took from his pocket another plastic bag, smaller than the others, and put it on the table. There was money in it, green and blue bills, folded.

  “A hundred dollars,” he said. “It was inside Bianca’s brassiere. Or, I should say, the bikini top she was wearing.”

  FAUSTINO WAITED FOR two days, which was the most he could manage. On the third day he left his office at lunchtime, headed for the underground garage, then thought better of it and hailed a cab. The driver shrugged when Faustino gave him the address; the shrug said, among other things, Whatever, man.

  At the top of the Carrer Jesús, the taxi was held up in the usual traffic chaos. Faustino noticed that they were alongside a bookshop called Bibliófilo. He told the driver to pull over and wait. The shop was a labyrinth meandering over two floors, and the youth manning the counter was the kind of nerd who needs a computer to tell him what he should already know. Such as the meaning of the words marine zoology. So Faustino spent the better part of ten minutes finding what he was looking for.

  It was dark inside La Prensa after the glare of the street, and it took a second or two for Faustino to see Fidel wiping tables in the far corner, emptying ashtrays into a small plastic bucket. Nina came in from the kitchen, bringing bowls of pork and beans to a couple of workmen wearing luminescent vests. They were the bar’s only customers. Faustino wondered how anyone could make a living out of the place.

  Fidel came over and greeted him. He waved his wipe rag in an obscure gesture of apology and said regretfully, “Life goes on.”

  “Yeah. How is he?”

  Fidel pulled his mouth down at the corners. “He won’t come out. Won’t speak to us. Felicia says he don’t eat the food we take out to them.”

  “Would it be okay if I talked to him, do you think?”

  “It’s worth a try, I guess.”

  Fidel led the way out through the back door and pointed Faustino to the shed. Faustino stood in front of it and looked around the yard at the propped-up facade of the old mansion, the litter blown in from the street, the sleepily watchful trio of feral cats, the patched and streaked wall of Oguz’s factory. He felt, and was, incongruous. A character who had somehow wandered onto the wrong stage set. A well-groomed man in a fresh blue shirt and pale chinos. A man carrying a
big and very expensive book which he intended to give to a penniless boy who couldn’t read.

  And then, very quickly, before he could take evasive action, he was overwhelmed by an emotion that he knew and dreaded. It was like an implosion, a shrinkage of the soul. He became a displaced person marooned in a world he couldn’t touch or be touched by. There is a moment in Stanley Kubrick’s film 2001 when an astronaut’s lifeline is severed and he drifts, struggling in his space suit for a last breath, into dark and dimensionless infinity. Watching it for the first time (alone in his apartment, fortunately), Faustino had let out a yelp of terror — and recognition. Now he only groaned, quietly, and waited for the hopelessness to pass. When it did, he knocked softly on the shed door. After several seconds, he heard Felicia’s voice.

  “Who’s that?”

  “Felicia? Bush? It’s me. Paul Faustino. Can I talk to you?” His voice was that of someone seeking sanctuary rather than offering consolation.

  He heard a murmured conversation, and then after another long delay, the door scraped open.

  “Señor Paul?”

  “Felicia, hi. I . . . how are things with you? How is Bush?”

  “Not too good,” she said.

  Then she smiled at him. It was a complex sort of smile. There was a welcome in it, and perhaps gratitude, as well as hurt. It was, Faustino thought, the kind of smile much older people use. And the girl did seem older. She seemed to have acquired something like — what? Authority, was it?

  “Could I talk to him?”

  She hesitated, then pulled the door wider. He stepped inside.

  There was not much light, and he waited for his eyes to adjust before he dared to move his feet. The hot air contained the odor of human bodies and the autumnal smell of marijuana. There was a wooden pallet strewn with blankets against the far wall, and Bush was on it, folded up. His arms were around his knees. He was all hair and thin black limbs. Above his head was a large patch of lurid color; it took Faustino several squinty seconds to understand that he was looking at torn-out pictures of Desmerelda Brabanta.

  Felicia went to sit next to Bush and laid her hand lightly on his shoulder. Faustino realized that he did not understand, could not imagine, their relationship. He had wondered about couples before, many times, but they had been adult couples. Childless men do not, as a rule, spend much time thinking about what kids feel about each other.

  He felt clumsy. Clumsily he perched on the edge of the pallet, because he was unhappy standing above them.

  “Bush? How you doing, kid?”

  The head came up at last. The eyes were yellowish, the lower lip sticky and cracked. He looked poisoned.

  “Maestro.”

  “Yeah.”

  “What you doin’ here, man?”

  “I was sent.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “By the approximately two hundred people who work at La Nación. Who all want to know where you are and how they’re going to keep the place running without you taking care of business. They’re giving Rubén hell, man. Plus, I haven’t got time to keep running down the street for my cigarettes. So I came to find out when we can expect you back.”

  The phony humor was pitiful, even to his own ears. Neither Bush nor Felicia said anything. It was intolerable, so Faustino pulled the book out of the plastic bag and placed it on the pallet close to Bush’s feet.

  “Also,” he said, “I wanted to give you this.”

  It was a coffee-table book called The Wonders Under the Sea. It weighed about five pounds, had cost Faustino ninety-five dollars, plus tax, and contained hundreds of photographs and not much text. Some good crab pictures.

  Bush gazed at it blankly. He said, “Wha’s gonna happen to her?”

  “Sorry?”

  “My sister. Wha’s gonna happen to her?”

  “Right,” Faustino said. “Well.” He wasn’t up to this at all. “I guess they’ll keep her there. Until, you know, they find out who —”

  “They keep her in a freezer, don’ they?”

  “I suppose so. Yes. Bush . . .”

  “Makes me so sick, thinkin’ about it,” the boy said, lowering his head again, resting it on his knees. “Jus’ so sick.”

  Faustino, lost in space, his voice gluey, said, “Come back to work, Bush. Come back to life, man.”

  A little later, outside in the yard with Felicia, Faustino lit a cigarette. The flame of his lighter trembled. The girl had her hands in the pockets of her grubby outsize shorts. She looked at the ground; her long black hair hid most of her face. Faustino, out of habit or possibly desperation, wondered what she might look like in other clothes. What kind of a woman she might become, given the chance.

  “Fidel says he’s not eating.”

  The girl shook her head, just once. “Not yet.”

  “He’s smoking dope.”

  “Yeah, some. He’ll stop, though.’Cause it make it worse, not better.”

  Faustino nodded, exhaling smoke. “Right.”

  “Thank you for comin’, Señor Paul,” Felicia said.

  It was almost a dismissal.

  “He needs to get back to work, Felicia. I know how terrible this all is. No, I don’t know. Sorry. I can only imagine. But life goes on, you know? He has to do stuff to take his mind off what happened. Isn’t that right? I mean, you guys have a future. It’s really, really important, right now, to, like, focus on that.”

  Crap, and he knew it.

  It shriveled him when Felicia looked up at his face and back toward the shed where she lived, somehow, with her wrecked boy. And said, “The future ain’t somethin’ we like to think about too much, Señor Paul.”

  Faustino went back into the bar to say his good-byes. The two workmen had gone, and Nina and Fidel were alone.

  “We’re brewing coffee,” Fidel said. “A cup for you?”

  “Er . . . yes, why not? Thank you.”

  The coffee was good. They sat silently for a while, as though listening to the sluggish whoosh of the ceiling fan.

  Faustino said, “I know it’s early days, but I told Bush he should come back to his territory. Do you think he will?”

  “He needs time to grieve,” Nina said.

  “Yes, of course. But grieving isn’t the same thing as brooding. I just think the longer he stays in there, the worse he’ll get.”

  He realized he shouldn’t have said it. Nina and Fidel hardly needed him to tell them.

  Fidel put his cup down and wiped his mustache with his fingers. “The thing you got to understand, Señor Faustino, is that they are scared. Really scared. For one thing, Felicia still thinks it was the Hernandez Brothers who killed Bianca. She thinks they might kill her too. In case, you know . . .”

  Faustino shook his head. “Nemiso’s people are sure it wasn’t them. For what it’s worth, so am I. I mean, she still had money on her. Quite a lot of money. And the way she . . . she died. If it had been a knife, a gun, maybe . . . And she hadn’t been sexually assaulted. It doesn’t sound like the work of a gang to me.”

  “That’s logical,” Nina said quietly. “But we’re not dealing with logic here. The fact is that Felicia will be too afraid to go anywhere by herself. And Bush won’t want her to. He’ll fret about leaving her alone.”

  “There’s another thing worrying them,” Fidel said. He glanced, uncertain, at his wife. “That’s worrying all of us. Which is, the police know where they are now.”

  “Yeah,” Faustino said, “but Nemiso isn’t a Ratcatcher. I also think he’s a decent man. I can’t see him as a threat.”

  Fidel shrugged. “Maybe not. But he’s not the only one who knows.”

  Faustino swirled the coffee grounds in the bottom of his cup. He had foolishly logged on to a world whose default settings were uncertainty, vulnerability, and dread. It was bleak, alien. He wanted out. To say, “Thanks for the coffee” and go.

  “The fact is,” Fidel said, “Bush and Felicia don’t feel safe here anymore. They’re not safe here anymore. They need to move
on, but they’ve got no place to go. It’s as simple as that.”

  Faustino looked up. Fidel’s eyes were fixed on his, and there was perhaps something challenging in his gaze.

  Faustino glanced at his watch and stood up. “I have to go, I’m afraid. Thanks for the coffee.”

  Nina and Fidel also got to their feet. They shook hands with Faustino.

  “I might drop by again, if that’s all right with you.”

  Fidel spread his hands hospitably. “It’s a public bar. Well-behaved citizens are always welcome.”

  Nina said, “He’ll come back to you. Felicia will make sure he does.”

  In less than five minutes, Faustino was cursing himself for not calling for a taxi from the bar. By the time he’d worked his way far enough west to find one, his blue shirt was dark with sweat.

  “Do me a favor,” he said to the driver. “Turn the air-conditioning up for a minute, would you?”

  “This is as up as it gets,” the man said.

  Reclining stickily in the backseat, Faustino closed his eyes and saw again Bush folded up below those glossy and incongruous pictures of Desmerelda Brabanta. He wondered what she would think if she knew. He recalled her standing with him, wearing that silver dress, in the roof garden of the Hotel Real. He groaned softly, remembering how he’d grabbed her, dragged her away from the railing. What was it she’d said, just before that? “If there’s ever anything we can do . . .”

  He opened his eyes and stared out the window, dismissing the thought.

  But it returned.

  CAPTAIN HILARIO NEMISO had been distracted from the Bianca case by several more pressing matters. Since the NCP election victory, he’d been engaged, more or less continuously, in subtle but nasty battles to preserve his authority and his budget. Despite his best efforts, he’d lost two of his trusted staff to Hernán Gallego’s expanded Ministry of Internal Security. Then he’d been put in charge of investigating the abduction of a nephew of a member of the Senate. (It had not gone well; the boy was dead when they got to him, as were the kidnappers. On the upside, the money had been recovered.) Bianca’s murder continued to preoccupy him, however, and not only because Nola Levy persisted in inquiring about it.